Category Archives: improvisation

Casa Valdez Studios: “Without going into full detail, the idea of the triadic chromatic concept is to take either major, minor, diminished or augmented triads and move them around chromatically and in random inversions. If you don’t repeat the same … Continue reading →

There’s some great talk over on Darcy’s blog about the notions of jazz vocabulary and strategies for jazz education, and some very good discussion too, I’ve chimed in with my own (cosmic) ideas, but the groove of the conversation is … Continue reading →

Miles Davis illustrated the collective coherence of improvisation by having the so-called ‘backing’ players punctuate the soloist lines with ad-hoc phrases, jarring the ‘leader’ back into the real-time, a push-pull give-take phrase by phrase inter-PLAY described by Ornette as “what … Continue reading →

Following up the last post On the Edge of Now, I thought I might offer a glimpse of the host of that documentary through this clip of Derek Bailey and dancer Min Tanaka as an illustration of the contextual essence … Continue reading →

By way of a teaser, the opening scenes from “Passing It On“, Derek Bailey’s ‘Improvisation’ entries in the BBC’s On The Edge – – dmtls tips us to the full episodes one and three which we can watch over at … Continue reading →